Chocolate Chip Cookies

Arguably two of the finest contributions to the art of the sweet snack from America are the Cookie and the Brownie. The best brownie recipe I've come across is in a Sue Lawrence cookbook and I'll blog that later. The finest chocolate chip cookie recipe I've come across is in Lloyd Grossman's The 125 Best Recipes Ever, which in turn is taken from The Wolfgang Puck Cookbook by, surprisingly enough, Wolfgang Puck.

Ingredients

100g (4oz) Unsalted Butter

75g/3 oz Sugar

75g/3 oz Brown Sugar

1 tsp good quality Vanilla extract

1/2 tsp salt

1 egg

275g/100 oz Plain Flour sifted

1/4 tsp baking soda disolved in 2 tsp of warm water

100g/4 oz Chopped Nuts - Optional - being a purist I tend to leave out the nuts.

175g/6oz Chocolate chips - I think if you leave out the nuts you are honour bound to increase this to 200g. Better still buy 200g of good quality chocolate and chop it into largeish chunks.

Use dark chocolate, milk chocolate, white chocoalte or a mixture.

Preparation

Preheat the oven to 180C/350F/Gas Mark 4.

First off bring the butter to room temperature in a mixing bowl. Then cream it with a mixture until light. With the mixer on a low setting slowly add the sugars, vanilla, salt, egg, flour and disolved baking soda. Mix until just blended. Stir in the chocolate and, if used, the nuts.

If the dough is too soft put it in the fridge till it stiffens a bit (something I've never needed to do).

Divide the dough up into equally sized portions. The original recipe says that the above quantities make about 36 cookies, but being a big cookie fan I tend to make between 9 and 12.

Form the portions into balls with your hands and place on a baking sheet leaving roughly 2 inches between each (the cookies grow considerably during cooking so need th space).

Bake in the oven for 15 to 17 minutes. Let them cool in the pan then transfer to a rack. The optimum time for eating is 15 minutes after they came out of the oven when they are still a little warm. Lacking preservatives the cookies wont last more than a couple of days, but hey I don't think that's going to be a problem, you'll be lucky if they last longer than a couple of minutes. Store in an airtight container.

Freshly baked Puck cookies a warm September evening with a glass of cold milk. Mmmm could be a midsummer nights dream....